


Nelson, Murdock and Stahl

by SpaceWall



Category: Avengers: Endgame - Fandom, Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Five Years Later, Hopeful Ending, Love Triangles, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Post-Endgame, Relationship Negotiation, Very Long Conversations, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 02:06:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19219390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceWall/pseuds/SpaceWall
Summary: In honour of Jessica Jones S3, which I have yet to watch, a look into the people who started Marvel’s Netflix world, after Hulk’s snap.Karen Page, eternal problem solver and nosy journalist, appears where she stood, five years earlier, and finds the world is different. Not different enough to stop her lecturing Matt for his own good, but certainly different.





	Nelson, Murdock and Stahl

**Author's Note:**

> CW/TW: mentioned suicide, one instance, non-graphic. 
> 
> Spoiler warnings: Daredevil S3, Avengers: Endgame. Mentions of Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Punisher and Jessica Jones all referencing non-canon events. I haven’t actually seen S2 of Iron Fist or Punisher (I know, I know) yet.

When she’d come back, it had been in the middle of what had once been Nelson and Murdock’s second offices. It was the offices for a pair of wills and estates lawyers, now, and when Karen and the young potential client who’d been sitting in the waiting room appeared at the same time, the estates lawyer who was at work had fainted dead away. Her secretary, rather more self possessed, tried to call the police, but all she ever got was a busy signal. Karen and the client- Eileen- had been as distressed and confused as the estates lawyer was. In the end, they’d turned on the news, and watched a confused report about the Avengers and a bunch of Wakandans fighting Thanos- according to the secretary, the bad guy of all this. 

“Maybe they found a way to bring us back,” Eileen said, staring wide-eyed at the TV. 

It did seem the only logical solution. “I need to call my sister,” the secretary said. Then she paused. “No, her phone will have been cancelled years ago.”

If Matt and Foggy weren’t here, then they hadn’t been vanished with everyone else. 

“I have to go,” Karen told the pair of them. “Do you happen to know where I could find the offices of Nelson and Murdock?” Neither had come back, so they must both have survived.

Blessedly, the secretary did. She scribbled down an address on a pad of notepaper, and handed the top sheet to Karen. 

“You know where that is?”

She did. As a matter of a fact, it was only three blocks from here. But they were very, very long blocks. 

That was how Karen was introduced to the world after. People in the streets, screaming. Those who had been returned to the exact locations of where their cars had once been were standing in the middle of the road. There had been accidents. And now the entire city had stopped. Traffic. People in stores and on street corners. Everyone was staring at their phone, or at someone else’s phone. Billboards advertised products Karen had never heard of. Some businesses had been replaced. Others were closed entirely: empty storefronts and offices for lease. Cheap. No wonder Matt and Foggy had moved. 

Who did these buildings belong to, if ownership had changed while previous owners were dead? Who was living in Karen’s apartment now? What had happened to all of her things? If this was what the world was, now, where would all the extra people go? Everything would have moved on without them. Should she even be going to Foggy and Matt right now? Surely they’d found a different life without her. Was there anyone she could go to, who she would trust to love her after five years absent?

Matt was standing in front of the building when she rounded the corner, hands folded neatly around his cane. He must have heard what was happening, by now. Must have heard her coming. The sea of confused people, no longer still but beginning to move with purpose, parted around him. He was an island.

In some ways, he looked just the same. There was as much wiry strength to Matt as there had ever been, and the confident way he held himself was just the same. But there were things that were different, too. His suit and glasses were both new, although very much in keeping with the sort of style Karen had always associated with him. His hair was cut differently, in a way that wasn’t entirely flattering. Most surprising of all was the wedding ring that glinted on his finger. 

She surprised herself with how relieved she was that Matt had lived a life these last five years. Even worse than him having moved on was the idea that he might not. Karen knew Matt. She knew how easy he found it to allow things to weigh him down until he was drowning. 

He didn’t bother to push through the crowd, but his head tilted slightly towards her, and Karen knew he was focused on her. 

“Matt,” she said, and watched his face twist, first into a grimace of pain, and then determination. He changed his grip on his cane, and began to walk towards her, giving people who got in his way ‘unintentional’ taps in the ankle. Since they were kind of being assholes, shoving a blind man in the middle of a calamity, she could hardly blame him. 

Karen, for her part, sharpened her elbows and began shoving towards him, too. They met in front of a closed deli, and Karen had barely begun to open her mouth before Matt’s arms were around her. 

“No time passed for me,” she tried to tell him, “it’s alright. I didn’t even really know I was gone.” 

“I knew,” he muttered, and Karen realized it wasn’t for her sake that he was holding on so tight. “I heard it happening and I tried to warn you and then I got up and you were gone.”

Poor Matt. Nothing scared him more than not being able to save the people he loved. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” retorted Matt, and breathed in deeply. Years of knowing Matt had desensitized her to the fact that he was smelling her. It was oddly endearing. While some might have assured themselves a loved one was present by looking them over, Matt sought other forms of evidence instead. 

Karen reached down to grab his hand, and put it against her chest. Matt could already hear her heartbeat, but the reassurance it was hers couldn’t hurt. Then she had a stupid thought and couldn’t contain a snort of laughter. 

“What?”

If only Foggy were here. He probably would have thought of it already. Also, he’d said much dumber things to Matt over the years, and wasn’t allowed to judge her. “Can you identify me by my boobs?”

Matt was probably desensitized to all this by five more years of dealing with Foggy. He laughed too. 

“I can neither confirm nor deny these malicious rumours, Ms. Page.”

Karen found relief light in her chest. “Why Mr. Murdock, whatever would your wife say?”

Matt blushed. He actually blushed. “Uh, husband, actually?”

He said it as if it was a question. “I don’t know, Matthew, you tell me.” He only blushed harder. “Matt! Is it someone I know?” He looked down at the ground, not looking away from her but trying to hide his face from her sight. “Are you actually going to make me guess?”

“Foggy,” Matt blurted out. And then, having told her, “Foggy, it’s Foggy. We’ve only been married for a year. Marci was gone. Lots of people were gone. And I went to these group therapy sessions and started getting my life together again and we spent a lot of time together and-”

Karen was fairly certain that none of his superpowers included not needing to breathe. “Calm down, Matt! It’s fine. It’s great. I’m happy for you.”

He took one great breath in. “I’m so sorry, Karen.”

Poor Matt and his Catholic guilt. “You and Foggy were basically an old married couple when we met. I’m more surprised that one of you had the nerve to put a ring on it than anything. Where is he, by the way?”

For the first time, she saw true sadness in Matt’s face. “He went to go find Marci, once we realized what was going on.”

When Karen had last seen them, they’d been engaged. “Fuck, Matt. That sucks.”

They pushed their way back through the crowd, with Matt’s hand clasping her arm tight as if for guidance. People had begun to move in earnest now, going to seek out loved ones. Some, seeing how much traffic had stopped, abandoned their cars in the middle of the road and ran. Businesses were throwing up closed signs as fast as they could, and everyone, everywhere, was talking about the Avengers. 

“I haven’t heard anyone mention Natasha yet,” said Matt, rather deliberately changing conversation. “I hope she’s alright.”

“Natasha?” Karen asked, wondering if this was another of Matt’s beautiful, weird exes. 

“Black Widow.” Matt stopped in front of the door, and allowed Karen to open it. Together, they walked into the foyer of a rather nice office building, and Matt led the way to an elevator. “Fifth floor,” he told Karen, and then, “she was in charge of the Avengers, while everyone was gone. Jessica and I reached out to them, after everything that happened, but it wasn’t really for us.”

Jessica Jones, presumably. From what Karen remembered of the woman, it must have indicated seriously dire circumstances for them to have accepted her help at all. “So people know that you’re him, then?”

Matt seemed to catch himself. “Daredevil and Jessica Jones reached out to the Avengers, but neither of them were qualified to deal with intergalactic threats, and Daredevil had a commitment to Hell’s Kitchen. Jessica Jones spent some time tracking down human threats, but was judged something of a loose canon, and she’d only really done it because Daredevil pressured her anyways.” 

Nelson and Murdock 3.0 was much nicer than either of the previous incarnations. There were several real offices, as well as a real desk for a secretary, and a real kitchen in the back. Three of the offices had name plaques for people Karen didn’t recognize. The other two, at the end of the hall, were Matt and Foggy. Matt’s office, when he led her into it, was very clean and organized. He’d hung his degree, a wedding photo, and some kind of community service award. On his desk, framed, was a photograph of the three of them, from the first iteration of Nelson and Murdock.

“Real estate prices went way down,” Matt explained.

“It’s lovely,” Karen assured him. “And you’ve actually manage to seduce some other lawyers over to your side.”

Laughing, Matt explained, “Foggy had the idea to have us take articling students from the community. One a year, but a lot of them stuck around after they graduated.”

Of course they had. “Do any of them actually make any money?”

“Foggy did exert some influence.”

Matt spoke so fondly of him. He always had, of course, but something had grown more tender. If Foggy broke his heart now, Karen was going to slug him. She wanted to ask about the marriage, about the wedding. They were, after all, her closest friends in the world. But that was the last thing Matt needed right now. 

“Tell me everything. About the city. About work. Did your and Jessica’s other super friends get vanished?”

Matt, once he had been persuaded to talk, was a compelling storyteller. And so he told her about the rise and fall of Luke Cage’s business career, and his surprising election to the city council last year. Of the breakups and merges of several major law firms, and the vanishing of various judges and prosecutors they’d known over the years. Danny and Colleen were both gone, but Frank Castle was still around. Last Matt had seen him, he’d been moving to Texas for some obscure reason. He spoke of the rise of Wakanda in world affairs, and how much cleaner the harbour smelled. The city was dirtier though, and he spoke of that too. Claire had not vanished, Luke’s friend Misty had. Jessica was mostly sober and Alias Investigations, in its current iteration, was doing well.

“There were a lot of suicides, especially in the first six months. Lots of people who had just lost too much. A handful of people who were convinced that this was the rapture, and everyone who was left were sinners. One of Foggy’s cousins died that way. Foggy’s dad vanished. It was awful.”

He told her about the summer students, and checked his braille watch for the time. They all seemed like lovely people. He talked about his and Foggy’s new apartment, and asked her to look for grey in his hair because Foggy-swore-he-saw-some-but-you-know-Foggy. There wasn’t any. He checked his watch again. 

More distraction was obviously needed. “What about Fisk?”

Matt tilted his head in confusion. “He’s dead.”

A random chance had picked her and Fisk, and left Matt and Foggy. How odd. “Well, he’ll be back now, I suppose.”

Matt shook his head. “No. I mean, someone killed him.” He fell into story mode again, and stopped fiddling with his watch. “After everyone vanished, I started hearing reports of this vigilante who was going around the world, killing major criminal figures who survived. At first I thought it was Frank, but he told me otherwise, and anyways, it wasn’t his M.O. Lots of blades. Lots of arrows. Not many guns. Someone broke into prison, cut Fisk’s throat, and vanished into the night.”

“Jesus.” 

He shrugged. “It probably saved my life. He would have come for me eventually, even if it took him a tremendously long time. My security was only guaranteed by his love for a living Vanessa. It seems a terrible thing to be grateful for, but I am.”

“I’m just glad you’re not hurt.” And more, I’m glad you had no part in doing it. 

Matt was quiet for a long moment. His hand went to his watch again. Karen automatically went for her phone, to text Foggy, and then realized all her accounts had probably been cancelled for years. 

“Hey Matt, do you have a phone I can borrow?”

He waved his hand magnanimously. “Use the one at the front desk. I won’t even eavesdrop on you. Foggy made me try my best to soundproof this room when we got other lawyers here. It only sort of works, but that’s why I’m at the end of the hallway. And I’ll turn on the radio, see if they know anything more about what brought everyone back.”

The truth was, Karen didn’t have a plan until she got to the front desk, and realized that the phone there was much more high tech than any landline anywhere she’d ever worked. It had a touch screen, and a bunch of pre-programed numbers and functions. And, blessedly, it wasn’t attached to the desk. Karen, making her choice, took it onto the elevator and down a floor. The fourth floor, who were some kind of consulting firm, had hung a big ‘out to lunch sign’ on the desk- despite it being well into the afternoon- and gone away. Karen settled into one of the chairs, and waited.

“Matt?” Foggy sounded older, rougher. He’d obviously been crying. 

“No.” Karen told him, and waited for his gasp.

“It’s so good to hear from you,” he responded quickly. “Listen, Karen, can I talk to you later? I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

“No. Shut up. Matt’s sitting here, sick with worry that you’re going to leave him. Call your damn husband, Nelson. I didn’t die for five years just to come back to sad-Matt and his kicked-puppy-face.”

“Karen-”

“Hey, do you have a number for Frank?”

“No!”

Karen hung up on him, and, pulling out her own phone, checked the numbers she had written down for Frank. There were three. One was a very confused young woman, and the other two were out of service.

Since they weren’t working, she took the elevator back up and called to Matt, “all the numbers I have are old. You can stop trying not to eavesdrop now.”

Matt came out into the main office. “Who were you trying to phone?”

Well, she’d succeeded in calling Foggy. “Frank. It would be just like him to have gone off into the middle of some desert in Texas and missed the news.”

Matt shrugged. Presumably, he didn’t have an accurate number either. Karen went to the kitchen and made coffee. The machine wasn’t that different from what she was familiar with, although the coffee was better. Then, because Foggy hadn’t called and Karen didn’t think they were going home until he had, Karen raided the fridge. 

“Hey, you have a packed lunch in here,” she told Matt. 

“Yeah, so does Foggy.” 

Because she was feeling spiteful by this stage, Karen ate Foggy’s sandwich. Matt picked at his salad. 

“So did you check the news?”’Karen asked him. 

Matt set his fork down. “I did. Apparently it was Thanos again, which is weird because we all thought he was dead. Well, no. It was the Avengers who brought everyone back, but then Thanos tried to stop them and they beat him. But the biggest news is that Tony Stark is dead. I still haven’t heard mention of Natasha.”

“Have you tried calling her?”

He did, twice, and got her voice mail both times. It was then, and only then, that his own phone rang. 

“Foggy,” It said, “Foggy. Foggy.”

Matt all but ran from the room in his haste to answer privately. 

It was a painful wait. The truth was, Karen couldn’t imagine what this was like, for any of them. For Matt and Foggy, to lose so much, find each other, and then for Matt to lose that, too. For Marci, to have a fiancé in one second, and for him to have married someone else in the next. It was a horrible situation. But that didn’t excuse Foggy letting Matt feel he was unloved. Matt was a good person. He deserved to feel loved. 

When Matt came back, it was clear he’d been crying. It was obvious in his posture. The way he held himself was sad. 

“If he’s hurt you,” Karen said, “I’ll kill him.”

“How are you so calm about this?” Matt demanded. “The whole world is changing under you. Why aren’t you fighting it?” 

Because Matt would have. Nothing in the world could have stopped him from fighting that which he could not control. 

“Fight what, Matt? Fight time? I’m not just going to sit here and accept this, but that doesn’t mean I should be trying to control it. I’m going to have to be declared alive. Like, legally. And I’ll need a job and a place to live. But you know what, Matt? I love you, and I don’t want you to have spent five years paralyzed by grief or worse. What would I have done if you’d gone out there and gotten yourself killed?”

He was quiet for a long moment. Karen slid his salad towards him, but Matt didn’t eat anything more. He picked up his fork, and fidgeted with it. 

“He told me that he can’t choose. That the promise he made to Marci was just as real as the promise he made to me, and he refused to make that choice. I think he was hoping I would call it off. Tell him to go back to Marci if he still loved her as much as me.”

“And you don’t want to.” Karen felt for him, and knew there was nothing she could do.

Matt shrugged. “We’re married.”

Poor, sweet, catholic boy. “Do you say that because you made a promise, or because you love being married to him?”

The look on his face was answer enough. Karen reached out. “I’m going to touch your hand now.”

Wordlessly, Matt accepted the touch, weaving his fingers through hers. Karen squeezed, and he squeezed back. 

Matt was a good person, but he was, historically, bad at love. Karen could personally attest to the fact. Elektra could have done the same, before she died, turned into a zombie and tried to murder Matt. Foggy, with years of watching, would have incorrectly asserted that Matt ‘had game’. And he wasn’t wrong. The problem with ‘game’ was that it got him sex, not love. It was the leap between the two where Matt always stumbled. He fell in love, but wasn’t honest. He fell in love with people who brought out the worst in him. He fell in love with people who weren’t ready to love him the way he loved them. Then, the one time he’d actually gotten it right, everything had been swept out from under him. 

“I think,” Matt said softly, “that I should call him back and tell him to choose Marci.”

Martyr-complex Murdock. “I think that would be one of the stupidest decisions of your entire adult life, and as your friend, I can’t let you make it at a time like this.”

“Well what do you recommend I do, then?” Snapped Matt, voice growing childish. 

“Well, do you know if Foggy’s going home tonight?”

“He’s going to see his parents.”

Perfect. “Then go the fuck home, Matt. Work out. Sleep. Actually eat something. Take a shower. Not necessarily in that order.”

The edge of his mouth quirked up in a smile, and he allowed Karen to gather up his things and sling his dorky messenger bag over her own shoulder. There were still no cabs. Transit remained at a standstill. Karen would learn later that there was an official moment of silence for Tony Stark happening. Someone would turn the lights off at Stark Tower. Later, they would be turned as bright as they could go. It was Stark’s Arc reactor that had brought light and power to New York as never before. It had seemed wrong to turn them off. 

“I hope your place is walking distance,” Karen told him. 

“You did tell me to work out.”

It was only an hour’s walk, with the streets so empty of major obstacles. Only pedestrians got in their way. Matt took her arm, mostly because she didn’t know where she was going. He guided her, and carefully maintained the illusion that the opposite was the case. When they made it back to Matt and Foggy’s apartment, taking an elevator up to their floor, Karen stopped. 

“How do we know nobody reappeared in here?”

Matt tilted his head at her as though she was being stupid. “I would be able to hear them. Also, I bought this apartment from the previous owner, a very nice old lady whose husband died of natural causes.”

It was a solid argument. They went inside, and after a long silence, Karen, for the second time that day, went through Matt’s fridge. 

“Something simple,” he murmured, from where he sat at the kitchen table. “I don’t think I’ll be able to get through too many flavours.”

Karen went over to the cupboard, and found white spaghetti noodles. She put water on. “Just with a little butter and garlic?”

Matt nodded, rather like a sullen child, and put his head down on his arms. Karen imagined he was listening to things far beyond her range of hearing. All across the universe, at this very moment, people would be dealing with the sort of thing Matt was. She hoped he could find someone who made him feel less alone. 

It was a nice apartment, with much of the furniture being originally from Foggy and Marci’s place. There were things that were very different. It was an older building, and so there were a number of pieces that tried to reconcile Marci’s modern stylings with the space itself. There were photographs along the walls and shelves in frames that matched those Matt had in his office. Their law school graduation, Foggy’s extended family, Foggy and Marci. Matt, Jessica and Luke. Little Matt and his father. Grown Matt and his mother. The wedding, both wearing their tuxedos, Matt reaching forward to put his ring on Foggy’s finger. That same photo of the three of them at Nelson and Murdock 1.0. 

It was so clear that there was love here. In some ways, it made Karen angrier, but it also filled her with a burst of unexpected hope. Where there was such a long love, there must have been something greater. Something ethereal yet eternal. 

Matt ate. Karen didn’t. She was too worried about him, and she’d eaten a late lunch anyways. Then she manhandled Matt into the shower, and finally, carefully, into bed. By this point it was almost midnight, and, although she did not have his skills, she could tell from the kitchen when he finally stopped rolling around and went to sleep.

The sound of a key in the lock made Karen raise her head and turn. But it wasn’t Foggy who came through the door. Instead, it was Marci who started at the sight of Karen.

“I-”

“Shh!” Karen hissed. Her chair made a sharp noise as it slid back. Marci stared at her, with a frazzled expression. It was clear she’d been crying, and she wore a man’s suit jacket against the cold. Her feet must have been killing her from where they were crammed into high heels. 

Silently, Karen offered her own flats, and made Marci put them on. Marci’s feet were smaller than hers, and so they were a little big. Karen put Matt’s shoes on, like a girl playing dress-up, and pulled Marci back out into the hall. 

“What?” She demanded, folding her arms across her chest. 

“I just got him to bed,” Karen hissed. “The last thing I need is to bring you and Betty Cooper over there into contact.”

Marci’s eyebrows shot up towards her hairline. “Foggy said I could sleep here.” 

Marci, like Karen, had nowhere else to go. “Look, I just- Matt’s my friend.”

Something in Marci seemed to soften, then. 

“I passed a diner that was open on my way here.” Karen raised an eyebrow. It seemed improbable that anything would be open at a time like this. “New York,” Marci added, as if this explained everything. 

In some ways, it did. “Okay.”

They took the elevator back down, each wearing too-big shoes and wrapped in jackets that weren’t theirs. They looked like they were being seduced at prom. Only, judging by how haggard and exhausted they were, it was basically the worst prom ever. 

The diner was open, true to Marci’s word, and the grandmother and granddaughter who ran it were serving the seven people strewn across booths and along counters. At least three of them seemed to be trying to sleep there. The other four consisted of two Japanese tourists- vanished together, but very lost- and an old married couple who seemed to be on some kind of reunion date. The looks Marci gave them were shot through with jealousy. 

The owners hadn’t turned the frier back on, or the grill, but they had some pie from that morning, and Marci and Karen each got a piece. Cherry, and not half bad. Marci ate hers in the half-hungry half-depressed way one always ate unhealthy food during bad times. Karen ate more slowly. The crust was oddly soft, and Karen’s spoon cut cleanly through it. When she bit in, it was too sweet and the crust didn’t make a dent in the flavour at all. Still, at a time like this, there were worse things than a little sugar. 

Marci pulled out her phone, and started typing something. At Karen’s look of confusion, she said, “Foggy gave me the Sim card from his work phone.”

Clever, that. She kept typing, and then, after a moment, stood and walked over to the Japanese tourists. They spoke, for a moment, and then borrowed her phone. When Marci sat back down, she explained:

“I looked up the number for the embassy. They’ll probably be on hold for a while, but they should be able to get through.”

Because that was the trouble, of course. Marci was a good person, fundamentally. She didn’t deserve to have her heart broken. 

Marci looked down at her pie, and then back up at Karen. “What do you want from me, Page?”

So that was where they were, then. “There’s a difference between what I want from you, and what I want for you.”

“Which is?” Marci gave her best scary lawyer look. Exposure to Wilson Fisk and all his cronies made Karen somewhat unimpressed. 

“I want you to be happy.” Marci seemed unconvinced. Karen pressed on anyways. “No, genuinely, I do. I know Foggy loves you, and as far as I’ve ever known, you’re completely deserving of that love. But so is Matt, and that’s the problem. Matt is the kind of person who would always choose unhappiness for himself rather than for others. Even if it kills him. Matt will try and make this easy for Foggy. He will lie. He will tell Foggy that nothing between them ever mattered, and that he should only ever have been with you, and it will be a lie. Here’s what I want from you: don’t let Foggy take the easy way out. Even when Matt hands it to him.” 

Marci was quiet for a long moment. Then she folded her arms on the table and rested her forehead on them. Her shoulders shook with quiet sobs. Considering whether or not to reach over and offer her comfort, Karen decided against it. 

Wiping her mascara with her palms, Marci looked back up at her. “What I hate most,” she said, “is that you’re all so fucking righteous.” 

“I’m a nosy journalist, Matt is a liar, and Foggy is kind of a shit. None of us have any right to be righteous at all.” 

Marci nodded in agreement. “And yet here you all are. Matt married my fiancé, and you’re sitting here telling me he’s too nice!” Her voice crescendoed and cracked. 

“You know that’s not what it is.”

“Yes, I do,” Marci admitted. She inhaled, chest rising and falling heavily. “I don’t blame you, you were as dead as I was. I don’t blame Matthew, either. Or Foggy. But I have to blame someone, don’t I? Someone has to be responsible for this.”

Karen understood the impulse, but it was an untenable one. “What are you going to do when there isn’t anyone to blame?”

“I don’t know.” Her hands clenched into fists on the table. “Karen, I don’t fucking know what to do.”

The patrons looked at them. The two tourists were still on hold, while the couple seemed engaged in holding each other. Then there were the three sleepers. Two were older men, one seeming homeless, while the third was a girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty. Her peers would be twenty-five, now, and closer in stage of life to Karen than they were to the girl herself. When her and Karen made eye contact, she looked away. 

“What would you do?” Karen asked. “If Foggy had been gone for five years and you’d found someone else.”

“I literally can’t conceptualize that,” admitted Marci, looking down at her hands. “I would like to think that it would all work out. That whoever I found would have a partner come back, too, and we could both be happier with other people. But what if I was happier with my second partner than with Foggy? What if they were happier with someone else, and in five years of change, I wasn’t the same person Foggy loved anymore? Then I’d have two people I loved, and still be alone.”

Matt didn’t quite have that, but he’d already lost plenty of people. His father and his father-figures and Elektra. And Natasha, she increasingly suspected, based on the continued lack of news. If one of his new friends had paid with her life bringing Marci and Karen back, Matt would never forgive himself for being ungrateful. Matt was a person with so much capacity for love in his heart. It wasn’t fair for Karen to be the only person he ended up with at the end of all this. 

“What if he just… didn’t choose?”

Marci’s head shot up. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, what if Foggy didn’t pick between the two of you? What if you tried to share? To work things out.” Karen waved her hands vaguely, as though this would help.

“What, like, polygamy?”

Not exactly, but this was not the time to get into the nuts and bolts of the thing. “Maybe. I have to imagine there’ll be a lot of people who are inadvertently married twice now.” 

Probably not a high percentage, but a higher percentage than five years ago. 

Marci tapped her long fingernails on the table. Across the diner, the tourists finally got through to the embassy, and began explaining their situation. 

“Do you think Matt or Foggy would be okay with that?” 

Karen had no authority to speak for either of them, and yet- “would it hurt to ask?”

Her fingernails ground to a stop. “No, I don’t think it would.”

They finished their pie, and the tourists finished their call. Thanking Marci profusely, they explained that the embassy was going to start dealing with passports for their newly-undead citizens in the morning, and they’d be fairly far up the queue now. Together, Marci and Karen went through their- and in Marci’s case, Foggy’s- pockets, and managed to find enough change to pay their bill and leave a 100% tip. It was cheap pie, and for all they were doing that night, it seemed more than fair to pay double. Besides, Foggy and Matt could pay them back for the emotional distress they’d inadvertently caused. What else were friends, lovers and potential rivals for?

They shared Matt and Foggy’s small guest room/office that night. It wasn’t a large bed, and they were pressed close together. It was awkward, but less awkward than waking Matt and making him switch with them would have been. Marci smelled like anxious sweat and a hint of leftover perfume. Karen couldn’t imagine that she smelled much better. It didn’t stop either of them from crashing almost as soon as their heads hit the pillows.

The next morning, Karen awoke slowly, rolled a little, and accidentally shoved Marci. 

“Sorry,” she muttered. 

“Shh,” Marci hissed. It took Karen a moment to realize the cause of this rebuke. But once she did, she silenced herself. 

“Let me go,” Matt snapped from the living room. There was a pause. “Foggy!”

“If you’re going, you don’t get to talk to me like that, Matthew!”

“Matthew?” He demanded, as if his own name was an insult.

Karen gave Marci a soft shove. She rolled over and raised an eyebrow. “Do something,” Karen mouthed, silent to keep Matt from knowing. 

“I can’t,” Marci whispered, not knowing the extent of Matt’s hearing.

Karen shoved her more firmly, and gave the door a meaningful glance. Marci groaned and pushed herself to a seated position. Her hair had knotted rather spectacularly in the night, and her mascara- not fully washed away as they tried to stumble silently to bed- had raccooned over her face. She was also mostly naked. None of this prevented her from going to the door and opening it just as Foggy said, 

“Would you just fuck off?”

Marci closed the door behind her deliberately, and began to lay into both of them. Karen rolled over, sprawling across the space where Marci had been, and tried not to eavesdrop. She wasn’t Matt, and didn’t intend to be. It became easier momentarily, as yelling subsided into speech. Karen buried her face in the pillow, and hoped for the best for all three of them.

Her mind wandered. She thought about the diner last night, a collection of strange people who had never met before and would never meet again. Their lives had touched each other. No matter how short the contact, the legacy would live on. She became deeply aware of her own heartbeat. Statistically, half of the people who were her biological age now had been born half a decade later. The world they’d grown up in was different. They had different tastes in music. It could have been worse. What if she’d been fifteen. Imagine being fifteen again, but with the people who were ten when you were fifteen. 

The door opened quietly, and soft, careful footsteps let her know that it was Matt who’d come in. He closed the door behind home, returning darkness to the room. It didn’t really matter to him either way. 

“I don’t know what you did,” he told her, “but I’m more grateful than you can possibly imagine.”

That got Karen’s attention. She rolled over to look at him, still clutching the sheets to her chest. Matt was smiling, finally. It was that closed, smug smile she’d grown to associate with him, but there was genuine happiness in it. He was wearing a suit pants and shirt, but no jacket. His glasses once more obscured the better part of the evidence he’d been crying, but Karen knew anyways. Not so much because of her eavesdropping, but because of the way his voice broke, even in his relief. 

“It worked out?” Karen confirmed. 

Matt shrugged. He pulled the chair out from in front of the computer, and sat down. Since she knew he could only get a vague sense of her body shape, and did not do so with his eyes, Karen didn’t worry about the fact that she’d slept in nothing but her underpants. Besides, it wasn’t anything Matt hadn’t seen before. Neither Karen nor Marci had wanted to sleep in a button-down shirt or a bra, so this had been what they’d had to agree on. Actually, Marci probably hadn’t realized that when she’d walked out to confront Matt and Foggy, both of them would have been able to tell that she was naked. Someone should tell her about Matt. 

“We’re all willing to try, at least. I think that’s what really matters, in the end.”

“True,” agreed Karen. She yawned, stretching one arm out and using the other to clutch her sheets around her. “Excuse me. How are you feeling about that?”

Shrugging, Matt reached up to cover a yawn of his own. “Hard to say at the moment. It’s a lot to process. But I’m cautiously optimistic.” 

That was good. Great, even. “So what’s the arrangement going to be like?”

“The first step is probably going to be getting a bigger apartment. Or at least properly converting this room. We think it’s better if we all live together. And then for the moment, it’s just gonna be us individually with Foggy, but if Marci or I want something else, we can talk about that.”

It seemed like they’d put the right kind of thought into all this, then. “I’m really happy for you, Matt.”

“Yeah,” Matt said, finally smiling with all his teeth. “I am, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> I see no evidence Matt and Natasha were friends but you also can’t prove they weren’t. Also she deserved a shout out. 
> 
> Questions? Emotions? Opinions? Tell me all about them! I usually respond to comments within a couple days.


End file.
